Nineteen Years of Thank You

Katrin has prayed every single night for nineteen years and has never once told God she is unhappy.

Her prayers are good prayers. She would be embarrassed by that description but they are. She thanks Him for specific things, which is more than most people manage. She prays for her mother's hip, and for a woman at work whose son is in trouble, and for a friend's marriage, by name, faithfully, for years.

What she has never prayed is a sentence about herself that is not a request for somebody else.

It is not deliberate. Nobody told her not to. She absorbed it slowly, the way you absorb an accent, out of a general sense that a person who has been given as much as she has been given does not get to complain, and that complaining is really just ingratitude with the lights turned down.

So she has been grateful for nineteen years and quietly, steadily, worse.

She went to a quiet day in the February because a friend had a spare place and it seemed rude not to.

She hated it.

Two hours of silence in a cold stone church with nothing to do and nothing to listen to and no one to be helpful to. She got through about forty minutes of it before she started composing a mental email, and then felt guilty, and then thought about the email again.

And at the end, one of the women read a psalm aloud. Not a nice one.

She read Psalm 142, which is a man hiding in a cave, and it says: I pour out my complaint before Him; I declare my trouble before Him.

And then she read the line where he says that no one cares for his soul, which Katrin had genuinely not known was in the Bible.

She thought about that in the porch, waiting for the rain to ease, with a paper cup of tea going cold in her hand.

And then she walked to her car, and got in, and sat there with the keys in her lap, and said, out loud, in an empty car park:

"I am not okay."

Three words. Nineteen years.

She sat there for about ten minutes afterward, and she would tell you that nothing dramatic happened, and that she cried a bit, and that when she started the engine something in her chest was different in a way she still cannot describe.

Now let me ask you.

When did you last tell Him the actual thing?

A man in a cave, and God kept it

Psalm 142 has a heading on it that most people skip, and the heading is important: it is a prayer from a cave, from a man being hunted, and it is in the songbook.

I pour out my complaint before Him; I declare my trouble before Him.Psalm 142:2

I pour out my complaint. The Hebrew word is not a polite one. It is the sound of a person emptying something out, and it is aimed at God, not at a friend.

And before Him, twice in one verse. Not muttered on the way home. Directed. Told to His face.

Now sit with the fact that God preserved it. He did not have the psalm tidied. He did not append a verse explaining that David should have been more thankful. It is in the book, in the hymnal of His own people, and it has been sung by them for three thousand years.

So hear this said over you, in the car with the keys in your lap. You are permitted to tell God the truth about your own life, out loud, in the plainest words you have, and He has been waiting nineteen years for it rather than being protected from it. That is written into His own songbook, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as helping us in our weakness when we do not know how to pray, which is exactly the position you are in.

Now let me untangle the belief, because it is a decent belief that has gone wrong.

You think complaint is the opposite of gratitude. It is not. The opposite of gratitude is entitlement, and you have never had a day of that in your life.

The opposite of complaint is silence.

And a great deal of Scripture is complaint. About a third of the Psalms are lament. Jeremiah has an entire book of it named after the activity. Job says he will speak in the anguish of his spirit, and at the end of that book God says Job spoke rightly about Him, and says it to the friends who had been busy defending God from Job's honesty.

Here is what nineteen years of only saying the tidy things has actually done to you. It has quietly made your prayer life a performance for an audience of One who already knows, and something in you knows that, which is why the prayers have got thinner without getting shorter.

You are not being asked to stop being thankful. Keep every word of it. Your mother's hip and the woman at work stay exactly where they are.

You are being asked to add three words.

The written word says to cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you, and casting is not a gentle verb, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a person's actual condition and carries it to the Father when they have not got the language. He is not fragile. He does not need managing.

There was a man five hundred years ago who complained to God at volume, and wrote in a letter that when he could not pray he told God so, in plain words, and that God had never yet been offended by an honest man saying an honest thing.